“Where do you eat, other than secret places in the Alfama?” Ed asks Carlos. We want to see how new chefs are developing the cuisine. What comes after 365 recipes for dried cod? He gives us names of a few restaurants whose chefs embrace the traditional food but also have fresh ideas of their own, ideas that ultimately enlarge a cuisine. He sends us to Mezzaluna to see what happened to Portuguese food when the Italian Michele Guerrieri came to town.
After all the down-home
tascas
, the cool sophistication of Mezzaluna transports us to Milan or New York. Intimate but not close, the room’s mirrors, prints, and gorgeous flowers feel welcoming. We’re seated among fashionably dressed Lisboans, women with black upswept hair, big gold jewelry, and fine silk blouses. The men wear dark, important suits. Somehow well-dressed businessmen in Europe look sexy and grand. The couple finishing lunch at the table next to us receives a plate of goat cheeses the size of kumquats. One is wrapped in leaves, another coated with ashes; others are creamy white. Soon we are eating fried and breaded radicchio stuffed with prosciutto. The spinach salad (ah, salad!) is dressed with lemon vinaigrette made with those cunning little local goat cheeses. Michele comes over to the table, and we tell him Carlos sent us. He’s a slight, young Italian raised in Naples and in New York, someone who has grown up at home in the world. His smile is wide, and those Neapolitan eyes laugh, too. He brings over a Quinta da Murta, Bucelas, and tells us how much he loves cooking with Portuguese ingredients, especially the seafood, and about his pleasure in bringing those ingredients in contact with Italian pasta. Of course, the whole world has taken to serving pasta with their own ingredients, and his use of local shrimp in a cream sauce with fresh tagliatelle provides easy proof why this is so. He combines pastas with goat, much loved locally and rarely seen on Italian pasta. His localized version of macaroni turns light with the inclusion of arugula, shrimp, and lemon. He has the immigrant zeal. He’s opened another restaurant down the street and has started a food magazine,
Gula
. Like an Italian, he visits with his customers, making his way around the room. Star Portuguese products—pimientos, eggs, eggplant, garlic, shellfish, and oranges—appear in new guises. The platter of oranges comes with a lemon and cider vinaigrette and shredded fennel. I can barely share my rolled eggplant stuffed with tomatoes and goat cheese. And oh yes, this is a fine restaurant: Carlos’s chocolate cake wheels by on the dessert cart.
Our
time in Lisbon is over. Carlos will come to visit us in Cortona this summer. We are taking off to see some of the interior and north of the country. He has given us names of
tascas
along the way, towns we must detour to see, and wines to try. We will drive inland to Estremoz, then go north to several characteristic towns—Évora, Coimbra, Guimarães, Óbidos—zigzagging where we want, then back south to Sintra, our last stop. We’ve made reservations at
pousadas
, the inns in historic buildings, and at two villas that have become hotels.
From
the car rental office, two turns and we’re on the bridge and out of the city. Soon we’re in the Alentejo, the pastoral countryside of whitewashed farms with glistening blue doors and waist-high borders painted around the base. Traditional now, the blue border once was believed to ward off the evil eye. Closer to Estremoz, for our first night out, chamomile flowers completely cover the ground under the mutable pewter and silver olive trees. A clump of sheep moves like a huge amoeba among stone walls, where wild pink dog roses clamber.
So many decades passed, and I did not ever see the Alentejo until today, did not enter the double-gated tunnel into Estremoz, or see the plaza and low white houses, did not ever, in all this time passed, discover this shady town with a fountain and a church with tall weeds growing on top of its pediments, white irises, plum trees in bloom, with a market full of caged rabbits, songbirds, chickens, turkeys, stands with swags of rustic sausages, handmade cheeses, bundles of herbs, and stacks of cod, with the scent of orange and lemon in the streets, with houses whose windows and doors have local marble surrounds.
One of those flash epiphanies of travel, the realization that worlds you’d love vibrantly exist outside your ignorance of them. The vitality of many lives you know nothing about. The breeze lifting a blue curtain in a doorway billows just the same whether you are lucky enough to observe it or not. Travel gives such jolts. I could live in this town, so how is it that I’ve never been here before today?
Partridges! Hams—fat, succulent, leathery, dangling around the tops of stalls. One man with blunt bangs and rosy cheeks sells skins. He holds up a stiff-bristled boar with the toenails still attached. I buy two goatskins because I once stayed at a hotel in Deya, Majorca, where the bedside rugs on brick floors were goatskins. I liked the combination of textures. May they not make the clothes in my suitcase smell gamy. We ask him where to eat, and he motions across the plaza.
Great bread. The texture of pound cake and made with fine cornmeal. We have to wait in the barnlike restaurant because they have dozens of market-day customers and only two people serving. People have the same habit that we observed in Spain—throwing paper on the floor. The floor is littered. Bread and olives and a bottle of water—that’s really fine with me, don’t even bother to bring us a menu. But the server does, and then she brings around rooster stew with rice and cod with potatoes. Tasty but heavy for midday. We lurch out into the sun and thread our way through the now-deserted streets back uphill to the glorious
pousada
, a castle above the town. Our quarters have a sitting room, fruit with a finger bowl, tall lilies in the bathroom, and a bowl of chrysanthemums between the carved antique twin beds, hard as graves. An ice bucket with a bottle of champagne has been left to chill on a lamp table.
My bed, immaculate in white linen, is slightly wider than a usual twin. The crisp coverlet and soft sheets feel chaste and inviting. Ed half closes the shutters for an afternoon repose. “Don’t you like these beds?” I ask. But I hear his breathing fall into the slow motion of dreams. Lying in the laddered light from the shutter, I sink into a very old feeling. I return to my bedroom in Fitzgerald and am again a girl in a white spool bed, an identical empty one beside mine. I can almost touch the scalloped edge of the pink linen bedspread and crisp sheets with my mother’s monogram, raised like veins on my grandmother’s hand. On the other side of the room stands my revolving bookcase, where I have placed
The Brothers Karamazov
among my Nancy Drew mysteries and only recently outgrown Bobbsey Twins books. My mother has brought home
The Brothers Karamazov
from a shopping trip in Macon when the department store book department (the only place you can buy books within 180 miles of us) had no more Nancy Drews. A thick book, she reasoned, and I went through the Nancys so fast. Accidently, she catapulted me into a new stage of reading, and after that Nancy was over. I always was a reader, but now I first began to be aware of the writer of the book. At the end of Dostoevsky’s novel, I felt a surge of exhilaration. I had met something great. That feeling, repeated with each transporting book, has been one of the prime pleasures of living. The blue and black Modern Library edition, heavy among the other flimsy books, became a fact of life. I had taken possession of the skirted dressing table with its silver brushes when my sister went off to college. Her perfume bottles and little tray of orange sticks, emery boards, and tiny scissors in the shape of a crane were my inheritance, too. In the narrow bed I became aware of the word
solitary
. Late at night I listened to Cajun music from a radio station in faraway New Orleans, with ads for hair pomade interspersing the songs. I loved the word
bayou
, loved to hear the phrase
on blue bayou
.
So the twin bed in the Portuguese farmland takes me to the green dial glowing on the radio in the otherwise dark room of the time when I was emerging from childhood. The
pousada
goes completely quiet in the afternoon. The castle seems to fall into a reverie of the sad death of Queen Isabel (perhaps in this room), the royal son who rode out to defeat the Arabs, and Vasco da Gama, who climbed the
azulejo
-lined stairs to meet Manuel and take command of the fleet that opened the passage to India. Because the castle is crowded with so many silent memories, my own past rises, too.
When
we veer off road, we’re suddenly on a track of crushed marble. Marble yards are littered with enormous Michelangelo-type blocks. We crunch down the road that ends at a cemetery. As in Italy, photographs of the departed decorate the graves. Some have a photo of the whole family.
Eterna saudade
carved on many slabs leaves no doubt as to exactly what
saudade
means. This cemetery in proximity to marble quarries is not quite like others. Laid out like a town with a central monument, the “streets” are lined with houses, like playhouses in elaborate marble, with marble bunk beds for the coffins to rest on. You could reach in beyond the lace curtains and touch the coffins, some of which are covered with silk, like bedspreads. Coffins are marble or wood. Carved saints and ministering angels and even a full-sized soldier at the door of his mausoleum populate this
campo
. The graves of the poor (or those with stingy relatives) are covered with chipped marble or glass. One innovative headstone is actually a cross-section of an oil drum filled with fake flowers and a photo of an old man. Grave number 524 is just a mound of dirt, where someone ended with no further ado when his long day was over.
Down country lanes, simple white churches suddenly appear, their forms as pure as wildflowers. Bulls congregate in the cork groves. Some cousins of Ferdinand the Bull relax in the shade. They gleam like polished copper, and each wears a bell. All the sheep wear bells, too, and when we stop, little symphonies are playing all over the rolling countryside. I hold out my voice recorder so that for the rest of the trip I can listen to this madrigal of the bells. We stop at Glória, where a woman stoops, mopping the marble stones around the outside of a church no larger than my living room. Her own blue-trimmed cottage next door is surrounded by tall daisies and rosemary. She smiles and opens the nave door, welcoming us as if into her home. I smell the clean whitewash, the scrubbed marble floors. She performs her devotion right here. The church possesses a fine beauty. The altar, painted with blue and yellow flowers, and the walls display ex-voto paintings offered by those saved from goring bulls, sinking ships, and tipped-over carts. The spring grasses are luxuriant, bisected, trisected with rivulets and torrents of rushing water. This is joy, to meander on back roads, windows open to sweet-smelling air, stopping to photograph the neat houses draped with yellow Lady Banksia roses, wisteria, gardens blooming with peonies. We pull over at another white church trimmed in heavenly blue, this one surrounded by a meadow of wild blue irises, smaller than the ones at Sea Ranch in California that cover the salty hills above the Pacific. Whitewashed benches in front of the church must invite visiting after services. We rest from our walk through the meadow, listening to the bulls’ bells ringing the changes.
The
restaurants in the
pousadas
are committed to preserving local cooking traditions and using the best products of the area. In the baronial dining room we taste a garlic soup with sheep’s cheese and bread. Bread soups, called
açordas
, are basic to Portuguese cuisine, just as the famous
ribollita
is to the Tuscan repertoire. I often make another “dry” Tuscan soup of bread and onions. I’m crazy about these soups you can eat with a fork. With such exquisite bread, how could
açordas
be anything other than sumptuous? In Lisbon we tried another with shrimp. We’re on the lookout for soups made with pumpkin or chickpeas, both staples in the Alentejo, an area known for delicious soups. Having seen partridges at the market, we are pleased to find them on the menu. Nicely served with bread and sausage stuffing, the partridge is rich and savory. They must have been served to Alfonso, Pedro, and Fernando, the three kings who lived here and to whom we must be indebted for the eventual fate of this
castelo
—a haven for travellers. The cheese course! All those bell-ringing sheep out there in the dark, praise unto you! Is there a saint of cheese? If so, I offer my thanks.
In the maiden bed I dream not a dream, just an image: an iridescent gray pigeon with a blue morning glory blooming on top of its head.
We
roam the countryside around Estremoz, looking at the smallest villages’ Roman ruins, towers, prehistoric stones scattered across fields, and more of the enchanting white churches left all alone in fields where their beauty attains a sculptural purity. The towns are sometimes so small that we don’t realize we’ve passed them. The whole Alentejo invites walking or bicycling. The sweeping terrain rolls on and on, expansive and empty. In this season the green fields look as though they are underpainted with light. And they are lit also with the music of bells! Oh, for a horse. This province may be Portugal’s poorest in income, but the people live in beauty, both their houses and their land, and enjoy the bounty of their own gardens and pigs. They are everywhere welcoming, though our communication, out this far, is almost nil.
Évoramonte is spectacular, a lost-to-the-world white village of church, hermitage, castle, and commanding view. In the cemetery perched on the edge of the steep hill, a life-sized marble angel sits at the head of a grave, looking contemplative. I think I never have seen a seated angel in a cemetery. São Lourenço de Mamporcão, with 558 inhabitants, possesses a little church with such a graceful rounded apse and bell tower that I sit down and try to draw it in my notebook. The organic curve looks as though it were shaped in one sweep by a large hand. Our drive ends in the fortress town of Arriolos, where some houses are trimmed in periwinkle and yellow as well as the familiar blue. Is this town real? A man is
vacuuming
the street—he doesn’t miss a butt—with a contraption a bit bigger than our garage vac. The town business is woven rugs, not needlepoint but a larger weave. In the cooperative a woman tells us the entire history of the cottage industry, beginning with the Moor converts, through art nouveau. She says in English, “Now the rugs are made by women who do not want a boss.” And who does? In the plaza where the wool dying once took place, a hidden fountain sends random jets of water in various directions, riffs moving at changing speeds and patterns, startling dogs and tourists. What fun to run through in the summer. I am everywhere imagining our new grandson travelling with us in a few years, can almost see him in a blue sunsuit making a dash through the arcs of water. The church, all tiled inside with blue and white scenes of acts of mercy, feels intimate. In response to the white, white town, even the sky seems bluer here. Men in berets play cards at a café, and a few women at looms sit in the doorways for more light. A pillory in the plaza is the only reminder that life was not always so serene in Arriolos.